Ubem's Deliberate Practice

[Fedodika]

I'm trying to think of a good analogy for the things holding you back, its like i think its like Icing on a cake. You're great at the icing part; Like for this chieften guy, his belt piece for example, is as well rendered as it will ever need to be for the rest of your artistic career. The rendering you present, the icing, is professional, but the cake it is on has some ingredients that havent been measured correctly. 

Like his hand, do you really think that's an attractive hand design? His eyes are strange, like one eye looks sad, and one looks like incredibly fearful. A great native american face for a chieften is very stoic and masculine, like there are intricasies of that character that yours is lacking, heres some examples

http://ep.yimg.com/ay/mcmahanphoto/nez-p...rint-5.jpg
https://cdn.history.com/sites/2/2014/01/...ull-P.jpeg
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/7c/95/be/...ceebc6.jpg

These dudes are like insanely stoic, full of character, mysterious, you can see in their eyes the've seen it all and it deeply affects them. Your guy has a face, sure, but would he look like a chieften if you took all the context away, all the outfit, skin tone? I don't think so, he'd like a scared sad generic face.Or his hand holding the axe, would a confident chieften hold an axe like that? Its tensed, like coming up a bit. A warrior would probably have it slacked at his side, if not in a dynamic pose to show strength. 

The outfit you've designed is cool, no doubt about that, but the body its on is just not impressive, mainly in the face and hands, and the torso has some strange anatomy going on, liek the pectoralis is sinking into the body in a weird way. His deltoids and muscle arrangements are inconsistent, like it goes from toned to average, and his deltoid further from us is strangely small, and the way the wrist connects to the hand has this strange blocky bump, whereas the other wrist seems more correct in narrowing before the hand.


This, fishy character is in theory a cool design, but like again the body its sitting on takes all that magic away. I mean it appears to be a female, but the face looks very masculine, you have these hard jaw structure and scars and stuff, which i mean can be part of a character design sure, but its ambiguity is confusing. Usually if something is ferocious and ugly, really push that you know, dont just make like a regular face with a grimace and add a few scars. Make the entire face about being fericious and ugly, dont have any semblence of attractiveness. 

I kinda get the feeling you didnt draw the arms out before you added the starfish stuff because the deltoids are non existent and her left arm is really high up as if its broken, seeing how the bicep comes out at a super hard twist. The body, and i understand shes not trying to be attractive, but its mushy and i feel like you tried to hide what you dont know about anatomy with the big starfish wrapping. And sure you can say its "quick" but that wont cover up these obvious mistakes. A lot of pros use tricks and shortcuts to save time like quick brushwork but that is not the way to approach making an image is expecting to use cover ups for holes. You gotta be confident and good enough to get it right all on its own if you expect it to be good.

http://crimsondaggers.com/forum/attachme...6801/5.jpg
This is just a goofy design lol, its like a sausage cerberus! How can he stand, im assuming his long front limbs are holding up his tiny heads and his back pelvis is just back there swingin; variation creates interest and his heads are mostly the same size. a cerberus is cool because his heads are either exactly identical or varied like the chimera or one with a birds head, lions head, etc. And again i feel like the long limbs are an excuse not to draw the proper limbs that would fit properly on a beast of that nature.To me he doesnt look threatening at all, i could probably smack him with the back of my hand and knock him over lmao

http://crimsondaggers.com/forum/attachme...6802/8.jpg
These figures, you know how attractive are they really? Would you be confident with just these as a line drawing? How much more could you improve if you drew 1000 of these and didn't paint one of them but got the anatomy and proportions on each one a little better each time?

You gotta get serious about the drawing side dude, that's why you feel lost, leading you to say, "What I do know is that I'll keep striving to improve even if it means never working as a professional artist, it's that fun."

That's your entire problem is you dont take drawing seriously and think icing will save you. You need to get on like New masters academy or jeff watts or any intensive DRAWING type course or education and start training on getting the pencil drawing to look good, with NO ICING! Im giving you the secret here it is, just draw, close photoshop for as long as you can and be confident that you don't need to learn any more rendering or painting for a good while, years even. Its all down to that pencil and paper making correct and deliberate practice.

Every flaw i picked out above has NOTHING to do with rendering/lighting/value/ or color, its all design and proportions/anatomy, and yes face drawing is anatomy. So im interested to see where you go from here and i hope you do what you feel is right ;)